From the many disturbing aspects of Donald Trump's controversial and dizzying first two weeks as President, a theme is emerging that, in the long run, may prove more dangerous than any individual policy: his unprecedented assault on institutions that could delay or derail his radical agenda.

As I wrote previously, this approach began, not by accident, with an assault on the press and intelligence community, two entities in American society that traditional provide the verified facts that are the basis for policy decisions. Trump set the stage for these fights by disparaging both institutions throughout the presidential campaign and transition, punctuated by his trademark pungent insults (the press as "the most dishonest humans," the intelligence community as employing Nazi tactics) aimed less at their work product than at their very legitimacy.

In a democracy, it is normal––sometimes even desirable––for institutions to advance different agendas, the collision of which produces policy. But what isn't normal is for arguably the most powerful institution to seek not to win arguments against the others, but rather to vanquish them.

Since becoming President, Trump has continued to undermine the intelligence community, first through an almost comically disrespectful speech against the backdrop of the memorial wall at the Central Intelligence Agency, and most recently by making his fateful decision about a special forces raid in Yemen, reportedly over dinner with a coterie of advisors––the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff––that included no intelligence-community officials. A U.S. Navy Seal was killed in the operation, reportedly along with a number of civilians and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula terrorists.

The press has remained a near-daily punching bag for the President and his team, which is not in itself unusual. What is not typical is the extent to which the administration seem to be questioning not just the tone and substance of press coverage, but the traditional role of the press in American society, a view colorfully and troublingly illustrated by White House strategist Steve Bannon's statement to The New York Times that the press should just "keep its mouth shut."

The latest harbinger came Friday evening, when the White House emailed a note to its press corps "for planning purposes only," that issued guidance to "hard pass holders," reporters who are permanently assigned to cover the President. The note alerted press that “All hard hard-pass holders, current and prospective, are currently being reviewed. You will be notified in the coming weeks on the status of your hard pass." Absent further explanation, and in the context of their ongoing besiegement, reporters were understandably left wondering whether this was a routine administrative step or if the White House intended to chill negative coverage while press credentials are under review.

Now Trump seems to be adding new institutions to his expanding hit list. The third institution Trump is increasingly treating as an enemy is the federal bureaucracy, the workforce that serves administrations of both political parties. Already Trump has all but removed career professionals from decision-making and asking others to simply resign.

The administration also dismissed a slew of senior State Department officials from jobs generally considered beyond the reach of politics, including functions central to the mission, such as passport production, visa issuance and helping evacuate Americans during oversees crises. After firing Acting Attorney General Sally Yates when she disputed the legality of the immigration executive order, Trump even sent a tweet that seemed (perhaps unintentionally) to question the strategy being employed by his own Justice Department attorneys, asking “Why aren’t the lawyers looking into the Federal Court decision in Boston…”

Meanwhile, as other administrations have done more sporadically, they have reportedly assigned to the front office of many executive branch departments political appointees with limited expertise or experience in government, and close relationships not to the relevant agency head but to the White House (career professionals quietly refer to them as “minders” or “commissars”).

They also seem to have replaced what has been, for decades, a regimented and inclusive national security decision-making process (which, while cumbersome, is designed to lead to informed outcomes and smooth policy rollouts), with a flurry of fiats, drafted by a few of the President's close confidantes and issued publicly before most relevant experts have seen them.

In preparing the now infamous immigration executive order, Officials from the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, or from Customs and Border Protection were kept in the dark. Given the pivotal role each institution had to play in implementing an order they had no role in producing, the messy results should not have been surprising.

When more than a thousand State Department civil and foreign service officers signed a cable dissenting from the executive order, through a longstanding, formalized process that is supposed to protect employees against "reprisals," White House press secretary Sean Spicer warned them to "get with the program or leave." By contrast, when Secretary Kerry was presented with a similarly sensitive dissent about the Obama Administration's Syria policy, he met with the organizers to hear them out and offer his views.

Now, Trump is signaling that his next institutional target may well be the courts, historically the most deeply rooted, constitutional check on executive power in our political system and the guarantors of our rule of law. Having lost a series of decisions that blunted, at least temporarily, the impact of his immigration order, he lashed out at a federal judge in Washington state who ordered a nationwide suspension, tweeting on Saturday:

"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!"

He followed that up Sunday, with a tweet that laid a predicate for blaming not just the judge but the American judicial system for a future terrorist attack:

“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and our court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

Presidents have often taken issue with court decisions. George W. Bush was frequently, publicly critical of decisions that went against the government in cases related to his war on terror, and particularly related to people held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. In his 2010 State of the Union Address, one week after the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United campaign finance case, Obama rebuked the justices for "open[ing] the floodgates" to special interest money in American politics.

But Obama prefaced his broadside with an ad-lib that acknowledged "all due deference to separation of powers." Trump's focus on the legitimacy of the "so called" judge––a George W. Bush appointee confirmed 99-0 by the United States Senate––and his ambiguous, almost imperative, statement that the order "will be overturned" are different, because they question the very authority of the judge to rule against him, and even the role of courts in our separation of powers.

Here too, context matters, including Trump's long history of launching attacks on judges who rule against him. But perhaps most troubling are sporadic but credible reports that certain court orders, for example requiring visas to be reinstated or detained travelers to be given access to counsel, were not immediately implemented by executive branch law enforcement.

So far, just about the only prominent American institution that could oppose Trump's agenda, and that he has not attacked, is Congress. That may be because, thus far, the Republican-controlled body has largely deferred and acceded to his demands. The truer test will come if and when, in the context of Trump's record-setting disapproval rating, the Republicans refuse to support unpopular Administration policies, or, as happened under Barack Obama, the opposing party eventually wins control of one or both houses.

Already, Trump's sustained assault on our most important institutions raises legitimate and enormously consequential questions. One is whether he is, at his core, a (small d) democrat and intends to govern as one, or as something else entirely. Another is whether other institutions with a voice in American society, such as the private sector, artists and entertainers, professional athletes or academia, will increasingly join the fray, and at what cost? And finally, will the institutions he already seems to be systematically eroding have the fortitude to continue standing against a withering onslaught that seems likely to continue in the coming years?

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”